Never a director known for his gentle handling of an audience, Gaspar Noé applies the cinematic thumbscrews with his latest picture, in some ways his most punishing film to date. It’s also a world away, stylistically, from the bold, synapse-sizzling aesthetic of films such as Enter the Void and Climax.
A painfully bleak portrait of an elderly couple at the end of their lives, Vortex is brutally matter-of-fact about the indignities of old age. The film’s one concession to Noé’s normally showy directing style is a split-screen device, used to convey the disengagement and disorientation of dementia – the wife (Françoise Lebrun) struggles to recognise her husband and anxiously prowls their labyrinthine Parisian apartment, hoping to find an anchor of familiarity. The husband (neither character is named) is a petulant intellectual, played by the writer-director Dario Argento. He views his wife’s deterioration as an inconvenience.
There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.
